“Maybe what?” he said.
“I killed people accidentally. Or I gave orders that led to the death of IPs.”
“Death of what?”
“Innocent People.”
I could hear him breathing against the receiver. In my mind’s eye, I saw a face with tiny nostrils and eyes that were unreadable and a mouth searching for a teat.
“You still with me?” I said.
“Then you’re not much different from me.”
“Wrong, Smiley.”
“Are you saying I’m not your friend anymore?”
“No, sir. I didn’t say that at all.”
He was silent, as though sifting through his thoughts or rebuilding his fortifications. “I’ll be close by. Maybe we can work together.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“Owie,” he said.
“What happened?”
“A man just stepped on my foot. He mashed my toe. Hey, come here, you!”
“No, Smiley. Don’t do that. Leave other people alone. Did you hear me? If you want to be my friend, you can’t hurt other people anymore.”
“Fooled you,” he said. “Bye-bye. You’re a nice man.”
I wanted to smash the phone.
• • •
I HOOKED MY BOAT trailer onto my truck and drove to Clete’s cottage at the motor court. An old problem had come back to me, one that I used to treat with four fingers of Jack and a beer back. I felt as though someone had extinguished a hot cigarette on my eyelids. It’s part of the pucker syndrome. Haven’t heard of it? It’s a level of anxiety you’d eat glass to get rid of. Think about a column of men going down a night trail, rain clicking on their steel pots. The trail is sown with 105 duds or toe poppers or bouncing Betties. You feel as though your skin is being peeled from the bone by a pair of pliers. You wait for the klatch under a man’s boot or the ping of a trip wire, and you fear your insides will turn to water and your sphincter to jelly. To up the ante, Sir Charles blindly fires a grenade with a captured blooker into the jungle, showering dirt and water on the canopy of trees. Your rectum has constricted to the size of a pencil head. That’s the pucker syndrome.
Clete was washing his Caddy in front of his cottage. He squeezed out the sponge and dropped it into a bucket. “You look a little wired.”
“You got a Dr Pepper?”
“Inside.”
I got one out of his icebox and came back out. I told him about Smiley’s call.
“Blow it off,” he said. “Wimple is on third base and knows it.”
“He doesn’t bother me. He only kills people from his own culture.”
“So what’s the problem, noble mon?”
“The guy who killed Lucinda Arceneaux will try to outdo himself.”
“You got the blue meanies, big mon. They go away.”
“With a fifth of vodka, they do.”